Professor Cooper is interested in intersections between culture and political economy, focusing upon gender, religion, and family life.

Biographical Notes

Drawing upon archival sources as well as oral interviews in the Hausa speaking region of Niger in the Eest African Sahel, Professor Cooper's publications have addressed female labor and slavery, gift exchange as social discourse, oral genres and the oral re-performance of pilgrimage, movement and the construction of gender, and the negotiation of a shifting political economy through the re-definition of marriage. She recently completed a prize winning book on the history of a minority Evangelical Protestant community in majority Muslim Niger that engages with the history of U.S. interventions in Africa, the problem of religious violence, the relationships between religion, secularism, and modernity, and the construction of gender in Christianity and Islam. Her current research explores the history of discourses of motherhood and of debates about fertility in the francophone Sahel. She serves as co-editor of the Journal of African History.

Awards, Fellowships, and Grants

Melville J. Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association for the best book published in 2006 (Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel)

Finalist for the African Studies Association 1998 Herskovits Award for the best book published in 1997 in African Studies for Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900-1989. Portsmouth: Heinemann (Social History of Africa Series), 1997.

Nominated by the Journal of African History for the Berkshire Conference on Women annual article prize for “Women’s worth and wedding gift exchange in Maradi, Niger, 1907-1989.”

Selected Publications

Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel. (Indiana University Press, 2006)

Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900-1989. Portsmouth: Heinemann (Social History of Africa Series, 1997)

WGS Statement on Academia and Free Speech Rights

It is inherent to the discipline of Women's Studies to deal with complex subjects through theoretical lenses, which question conventional knowledge production. This department, one of the most distinguished departments of WGS in the country, has a highly visible faculty of national and international reputation invited to speak in various fora on sometimes highly controversial subjects. Such faculty members, as scholars, have not only a right, but also an obligation to produce and disseminate knowledge within and beyond the academy. Moreover, as private citizens, our faculty continue to enjoy the same freedoms of speech and expression as any private citizen and in accordance with university policy the department supports their protection from institutional discipline in the exercise of these academic and free speech rights.